Starting a Travel Blog - Using Posterous

I've been travelling so long that I have the pile of postcards that I sent home to my mum as I travelled the road - its a fun thing to have now - but I spent many hours writing them, queuing for stamps and sometimes I bet them home (though most did arrive eventually).

Times have indeed changed and as I am about to head off to Asia and Europe for two months I deciding how to keep people updated. I rather like Facebook - and posting regular updates complete with pics had some appeal - but not all my friends are on Facebook. Also sometimes the Facebook App is quite slow on a phone - so I am not convinced that I could be bothered using it.

I could have just started a WordPress blog - have quite a number - but I figured this would be a blog that died when I stopped travelling so I didn't really want to spend any money on it - WordPress is free and I have hosting but I still would have had to paid for the domain name.

I could have setup a free blogspot or Wordpress.com blog - but there would be a bit of a learning curve with blogspot (I've forgotten what I knew), wordpress.com is very restrictive about how you can use it and they delete blogs and ask questions later - I don't like other people deleting my stuff.

There are also any number of alternative free sites around - some easier to use than others.

Travel Blogging - What You Need

If you are travel blogging then really you need to be able to quickly share photos and videos - that's the bottom line. I want to do it from phone, I want to do it easily while waiting for a drink at a beachside bar or chilling out at night market food stall. I am not planning on writing a 1000 words - but I want to do it quickly and easily. 

I also wanted to update my Facebook page automatically. I wanted the site to look quite good, and I wanted it to be easy for people who don't know what RSS or a feed reader is to be automatically updated. 

Posterous - Excellent for Travel Blogging 

Then I remembered a service called posterous.com. I was actually introduced to it by another friend who is a blogger here - who wrote about a hub about Posterous  a while back. 

The site is still fast, its still free (up until you have 1GB of content anyways!), there are no ads. There are some choice in themes and but they are basically simple and clean - which I think is important if you looking at photos. 

The really good thing about Posterous is that all you do to post to it is send an email! Send your words as an email - attach your photos or videos (you can also use it to post podcasts and pdfs and other document types). And you can set it up to automatically update your Facebook page (and your Twitter profile, Flickr and Picasa (for photos), youtube and vimeo (for video), tumblr, blogger, wordpress.com and Xanga blogs). 

From what I've seen it works quickly and efficiently - even putting any photos on your blog into your Facebook photo albums. 

It may just be just about as easy as writing a postcard - with less time waiting in line at the post office. 

Most of your cellphones appear to be locked to carrier networks - so if you buying one to travel with make sure that it work overseas (not all US phones will) and that it is unlocked - which means you can buy a local SIM card when you get to your destination and pay local rates. 

Alternatively buy an WIFI enabled phone as most of the world have either free or low-cost WIFI in most towns and cities. 

What about you - do you have a travel blog to stay in contact when you are travelling?